A Rich Girl's Boredom
by Tabbyluna
Summary: During class, she couldn't help but think. Think and wonder why she had a connection to a bird.


Summer term. Dreamcatcher hated summer term. It was supposed to be the summertime, where girls like her could freely spend their days however they wanted to. Happy and carefree, living their lives. The summertime should be a period of freedom, in her opinion. A period of fun and joy and rest. The sun provided warmth, the rains were cool and refreshing, seasonal fruits ripened and were ready for harvest. Such a season should be spent enjoying oneself.

Most people did enjoy themselves, she knew that much. In most places in Skylands, teenage girls did not need to attend school during the summertime. But because she was wealthy, and her parents claimed they cared about her, she got shipped to an elite boarding school where she would study all year long. It boasted that its curriculum was superior to other places in Skylands, and since her Mother was both wealthy and an alumnus to this all-girls school, she got accepted in without hassle.

School was fairly easy for her. Despite the school claiming that they had an advanced curriculum, she could easily breeze through most of her lessons without needing to study. But if there was one thing she hated about school, it was the fact that everything was just so dull.

Everyday, her hair was tied using a dark grey ribbon, for the school had a dress code and dark greys were the school colours. She would spend her days walking through grey, concrete corridors to air-conditioned lecture halls. Once in the lecture halls, she would greet the same teachers she had always greeted, ever since she started classes here. They were all old and wrinkled, for they had been teaching in the same school for decades. The newest member of the faculty was a janitor, and she had joined ten years ago. Then they would always ask the class to open up their textbooks. The teachers would name a page number, and all the girls in the hall would obey. Then the next period would then be spent having information beaten into their skulls. Pens and pencils flew above notebooks, with girls taking notes as quickly as they could. In more recent years, girls have started using laptops, so fingers would fly across keyboards instead. When the bell rang, girls would flood out of the lecture halls, with only five minutes to get to their next classes.

The only break they had for the entire day was during lunch. For forty-five uninterrupted minutes, all nine thousand girls enrolled in the school would assemble in the canteen, and eat their lunches. After school proper, they had self-study. Which was like homework, but even worse. Because your teachers were all there to make sure you did it, so you couldn't skip it to do something fun. And then it was a quick dinner with the teachers eating in the canteen alongside them (they prepared for afternoon lessons during lunch), then lights-out. And the matrons were all as strict as prison wardens. There were no free periods, as the school insisted on all their girls taking up extra curriculars. So for those forty-five minutes, the girls learned to make the most of their time.

She would always spend the lunch period together with her friends. Together, they made up the delinquents and mean girls. They were infamous among their classmates. During lunch, they could target any girl in the canteen to be a victim of a prank. No one was safe. It didn't matter if you were a junior or a senior, a goody two-shoes or a burnout, a goldling or any other species. If you ate lunch in the canteen, and you needed to eat there, as the teachers were strict about it, you might get pranked by this posse.

She enjoyed being a terror to the school. It very much helped to break up the monotony of the day. Usually, she would be the mastermind behind those schemes, as she had the most free time out of all the girls in the gang. Being a bright student, she could easily finish up the required work for the day, and thus a large chunk of her time in class would be spent daydreaming. Concocting new schemes for her and her girls to try out. It was fun. And it gave her more of a challenge than her schoolwork, so she enjoyed doing it. Besides, they had never gotten caught before. Not even once. They were quite proud of their ability to pull pranks, and they swore that they would carry on pulling them until graduation.

Today, she was ready for another day of scheming up pranks. They only had forty-five minutes to execute them, so she knew they had to make them count. The first period of the day, Maths, she did what she usually did. She took notes during the lecture, finished up the assigned work as quickly as possible, then she pulled out a thin notebook, hid it in her textbook, and tried to brainstorm what she could do.

There was only one problem. That day she couldn't think of any ideas.

She's usually a fountain of prank ideas. If you gave her the lunch menu and the seating arrangements for the day, she could come up with a scheme within minutes. They were all very original too. Ranging from surprise bubblegum popping to extra spicy spaghetti sauce. There was a reason why she was usually the ringleader in her gang of friends, and that was because she had the most creative plans. But that day, in Maths, nothing popped into her mind.

She thought that maybe it was just a slow day. Next period would probably bring some sort of idea. It was Chemistry the next period, and she usually got some great ideas in Chemistry.

So she rushed through the corridor to the Chemistry lab, and eagerly waited for the class to start. When it did, she took notes as quickly as she could, and finished up the class assigned work as soon as possible. But once she did, and she pulled out the little notebook again, her mind blanked out.

Dreamcatcher took a deep breath, and tried to remember what was on the lunch menu again. That was usually good in helping her come up with a prank. She thought back on their extra spicy spaghetti sauce prank and chuckled to herself. Ah, that was one of their best ones. It had taken a week of planning, but it was so worth it. Most days, the school cooks would cook something so bland, she thought that their addition of extra spicy hot sauce was an improvement.

Although she couldn't do a repeat of that now, partially because it would be harder to add hot sauce to something like macaroni and cheese, but mainly because she hated repeating pranks on the same audience. After all, fool them once, shame on you. Fool them twice, shame on them. And unfortunately most of the girls in this school were not stupid. They were too careful to be duped twice. So she always needed to challenge herself and come up with more and more elaborate pranks.

It was usually fine by her. Most of their repeated pranks would be done on the first years. But they were always the classic pranks, like buckets of water on doors. Or whoopie cushions. The elaborate, creative, inventive schemes were always reserved for the older girls. And the more elaborate and outlandish the prank, the funnier the reaction of the girl, usually. That was why they kept doing the pranks, the reactions were all a hoot, and doing this provided a break from the monotony of school life.

Chemistry came and went faster than she thought it would. But still, she had nothing to tell the girls later at lunch. Maybe they could brainstorm some sort of plan together later, but she can't help but feel like she would be disappointing her friends. She had been on a roll lately. Coming up with brilliant prank after prank, humiliation after humiliation. It would be such a shame if she were to break her streak.

But as she set off for her final class before lunch, Language Arts, it looked like that was going to be the case. In the class, she copied down her notes, then out of habit finished up her work in under fifteen minutes. It left her with the rest of the class to daydream and do her own work, but she still had no ideas for any sort of pranks.

Her eyes looked over her notes again. She was bored, and with nothing left to do, she took a look through her notes again. In the process of doing so, she caught a few spelling errors she made, and started to fix them. Changing 'as strog as an ox' to 'as strong as an ox', 'as quick as a hair' to 'as quick as a hare', all the way until she finally reached the last phrase copied down. 'As free as a bird'.

What a phrase. She knew that all phrases started out many years ago, growing and advancing and changing all the time, but never straying too far from their roots. But if she were to be honest with herself, most of the birds she had ever seen were caged.

Most of her life has, admittedly, been rather sheltered. She hated that she was a sheltered young girl, but that was the truth of the matter. Her childhood was mostly spent exploring her mansion, the mansions of other wealthy people, and the boarding schools she had attended. In both those types of locations, mansions and boarding schools, security tended to be tight. And in those cases, as her social circle consisted of the wealthiest of the wealthy, the security systems were so tight that not even a sparrow could fly over them and enter. Hence, at least ninety-nine percent of the birds she had seen throughout her entire life had been caged.

Out of boredom, she tried to recall any significant memories of birds. And her mind immediately jumped to one such incident.

It had been at some sort of fancy cocktail party. Her parents were invited to it to discuss business. She wore a black satin bow. It wasn't something she was all that fond of, parties where everyone had to dress in all black. But she did get to explore the house. She supposed one benefit about having busy parents was that they left her unsupervised a lot. So she scounted around the house, all by herself. Letting her parents eat cheese and crackers and drink wine and talk to important businessmen and businesswomen.

She glided across the polished marble floor. Silently maneuvering her way around waiters and other invited guests until she reached the stairs to the second floor. Quietly, she snuck through the house, exploring the different floors in the mansion. It wasn't terribly hard. The house was so large and spacious, that if you were to speak too loudly, your voice would echo. And fortunately, people were getting drunk and were loudly cracking jokes on the first floor. So any tiny noise she made was drowned out by the echoes.

Eventually, she reached the top floor of the mansion. The house had a glass ceiling, so when she got there, she could see nothing but an inky black night sky. Not a single star could be seen, as the mansion was built in the heart of the city. But there had been a half moon that night. It was bright and beautiful, and she recalled staring at it for a good long time. Before she eventually got bored and went off to explore the final floor.

She had been disappointed by what she had seen so far. The host had been another one who hired a bunch of interior designers to decorate his home. She had seen that type of house too many times to count, and at this point she had grown sick of the same minimalistic design so many interior designers tended to favour. But, looking around the top floor, she realised that the host had saved all his most interesting things for the highest floor of his mansion.

In one room, he had a greenhouse setup. There, a wide variety of vegetables grew. Every type Dreamcatcher could name, as well as some she could not. In another room, there were shelves and shelves of books. Most were non-fiction books about business and economics though, so she did not find any titles which interested her. In the next room, she found that it was filled with strange knick knacks. From snow globes to magnets, if it could be sold as tacky merchandise in a gift shop, it was in the room.

But it was the final room which intrigued her the most.

Before she entered that room, she heard weird noises from outside the door. Strange noises, which proved that a living thing was behind the door. When she opened the door, she soon found out that she was wrong. It wasn't just one living thing.

It was actually many living things.

The room was filled with cages. Huge, fancy cages, carved out of wood or made out of metal. And in all those cages were thousands and thousands of birds, all locked inside those cages.

There were all sorts of birds in that room. Some large, some tiny. Some had long and straight beaks, while others had short and curved. There were those with long wingspans. There were those with lots of plumage. And they came in all colours, from red to green to blue to purple. Dreamcatcher, in her short life, had never seen so many different species of animals gathered together in one place.

She slowly glided through the place, observing the way those birds all behaved. Some squacked loudly, flapping their wings and shedding their feathers everywhere. While others fluttered quietly, singing softly to themselves. Some stood still sleeping. And yet others watched her walk around, hopping from leg to leg, curious about the small girl in the room. But she ignored most of them, for she had her eyes set on one particular bird in the room.

Slowly, she drifted over to the centremost cage. There, shining under the moonlight, was a huge golden cage. It might have been painted gold, but it had probably been crafted out of actual gold. But within the cage, there was a small white bird. With pearly white feathers covering its body, it practically gleamed under the moonlight. It looked surprisingly healthy for a bird living exclusively in its cage, with its tiny black eyes and tiny orange beak having a nice shine to them. But what intrigued Dreamcatcher the most was its long, swooping tail feathers. They were longer than the bird's entire body, and they draped down gracefully. It reminded Dreamcatcher of a long fur coat her mother's friend owned. Being literal floating heads, they could never wear anything like that, but she had always envied those who could wear something like that.

She wondered if those feathers could make a good hair clip. And she kept thinking about it as she watched the bird until it notice her.

It was silent when it first saw her, but when it did, it constantly flew around in a manner which could only be described as panicked. Almost as if it was trying to escape from its golden cage. As Dreamcatcher watched, she was overcome by a strange feeling. Being the young child that she was at the time, she didn't bother to label that emotion with a word. But once she grew up, and thought back on that night which had turned out to be surprisingly impactful, she had used many different labels to describe that feeling.

At first, she thought that she felt pity for the bird. Until she realised that it was the wrong word to describe that feeling. She never really pitied animals, not even as a little girl. The next word she used was empathy. But then she realised that empathy was the wrong word to describe it too. She was never really an animal-loving, hippie-dippy young girl. Even as a kid, she adored furs and feathers, and never really cared much for the animals which needed to be harmed. The more endangered the species was, the better. And it was only years later, when she was sitting in English class, did she discover a word which described how she felt.

Solidarity. She felt solidarity with that bird.

The school bell rang, simultaneously signalling the end of class and snapping her out of her thoughts. As she gathered her books, she hoped that her friends had some sort of plan. It was admittedly rather embarrassing to return to them empty-handed. But if you wanted to be a school prankster, you needed to know how to think on your feet. (In her case, it would be metaphorically speaking.)

Maybe they could ask the new girl, Persephone, if she had any ideas. It was a rare occasion where they would let in new blood, but Persephone was pretty cool. After she survived the initiation ceremony, she had officially been a part of the group. For a first year, she had impressed them. The girl had been able to keep up with their plans, even if she had not been at the forefront of any of them yet. Maybe this was the time for her to show her stuff. If she wasn't ready, maybe she'll ask some of the other girls to do so.

Either way, it was back to the daily grind. The boring, dull existence of a private boarding school student. Though macaroni and cheese was on the menu for lunch, she doubted that it would taste like anything worth eating. After lunch, this short forty-five minutes of fun with her friends, there would be more work to be done. More boring, inane things to do on this fine summer's day.

She didn't have anything to look forward to, which was the worst part about summer term. Summer was supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of exploring the world, and having fun. She hated that she had to spend that precious time in a school, where her schedule was predetermined and her outfits were uniforms. Especially since she knew that out there, there were thousands of teenage girls who were out there, free and as happy as the birds.


End file.
